Blog Roll

News Posts

On the eastern edge of Long Island Sound, a small, rocky piece of land known as Great Gull Island houses the crumbling battlements of a U.S. Army fort and some 11,000 nesting pairs of Common and Roseate Terns. The Museum purchased the island in 1949 to preserve a breeding habitat for terns displaced by increasing development on Long Island’s beaches. The acquisition has proven to be a success, as the remaining Army structures are a nesting tern’s delight.

Museum scientist Eleanor Sterling has been chosen as a recipient of this year’s Faculty Mentoring Award at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Sterling, who is the director of the Museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, serves as the director of graduate studies and as an adjunct professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology at Columbia.

After millions of years of evolution, only one human species remains: Homo sapiens. In this podcast, join Museum Curator Emeritus Ian Tattersall in a discussion about his recent book, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins—a history of paleoanthropology and an account of how Homo sapiens survived while other human species went extinct.

The Urban Advantage Science Expo will return to the Museum for its eighth year on Saturday, June 9. More than 300 science projects will be presented by over 500 middle school students. Project topics reflect a wide range of subject areas in the life, Earth, and physical sciences that were investigated by students in connection to their class visits to the Urban Advantage partner institutions, and include projects on the effect of zebra mussels on the Hudson River ecosystem as well as whether music influences plant growth. Watch a video.

Fear can take many forms, from minor phobias to life-altering conditions such as PTSD. Now, new research is shedding light on how these so-called fear memories could be changed. At the final SciCafe of the season on Wednesday, June 6,neuroscientist Daniela Schiller will discuss her work on the neural mechanisms of emotional control and potential ways to modify or “erase” fear memories. Schiller recently answered a few questions about how memories are created and lost.

How did you first become interested in studying emotional memories?

It wasn’t an explicit decision. I started with philosophy and psychology, and I was interested in the brain and the mind. And the combination is the neural basis of behavior, and within behavior, emotion is fascinating because it’s the least willful process we have. We think emotions just happen to us, but they don’t just pop out of the blue. It’s interesting to look at the mechanism and see that it’s a very distinct process in the brain that you can observe and counteract and modulate.